I've been reviewing the Second Noble Truth and want to share what the Theravadin scholar Walpola Rahula wrote about it in his book What the Buddha Taught. If you've got a copy of the Grove Press edition, you can find this on pages 30 to 32.
In his first sermon after his enlightenment, the Buddha said that dukkha (stress; dissatisfaction; suffering) arises from tanha, which means "thirst" or "craving." And craving arises from belief in a permanent, separate self. This belief is a function of mental volition or will.
According to Walpola Rahula, the terms craving, volition, and karma all denote the same thing. "They denote the desire, the will to be, to exist, to re-exist, to become more and more, to grow more and more, to accumulate more and more." He noted also that all of these things are functions of the fourth skandha, mental formations.
This brings a couple of things home for me. First, the more I learn about the Buddha's teaching, the more I see how integrated it all is. At first, it might seem to be a big jumble of alien concepts -- skandhas and dukkha and the Twelve Thises and the Five Thats, etc. But the many teachings reinforce and support each other in a grandly logical way.
Second, once again, the foundation for understanding any of this is an appreciation of anatta, or sunyata for some of us. Without at least some grounding in n0-self, a person has no hope of understanding the rest of it.
Walpola Rahula explained that this point about the origin of dukkha is among the most important of the Buddha's teachings. It helps us understand that the cause or germ of the arising of dukkha is within dukkha itself, and the cause or germ of the cessation of dukkha is within dukkha itself. Enlightenment is not something that will come out of the sky and chase dukkha away.
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